Thursday, 26 January 2017

CIA had no information that could have given advance warning

Two nuclear submarines were involved in a collision off the west coast of Scotland at the height of the Cold War, according to a document from 1974, which is in a batch of around 13 million published online by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

They shine some light on decades of spooks’ thinking in the US and were put on the CIA Records Search Tool (Crest) following a lengthy challenge from Muckrock, a freedom of information pressure group.

The papers were in the public domain, but could only be inspected on a personal visit to the National Archives in Maryland, where only four computers gave office-hours access to Crest. This, said Muckrock, “presented an obstacle to many researchers”.

The documents cover a vast range of topics including briefings on the Lockerbie bombing, UFO sightings, psychic experiments from the Stargate programme and include a collection of papers from Henry Kissinger, the former US diplomat, secretary of state and national security adviser, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (...)

TO examine them properly you would need to set aside a month or so. Apart from the sheer volume, the CIA search engine is not the best and an innocuous search can turn up 50,000 or more documents.

It describes allegations – later discredited – that the CIA allowed terrorists to place a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103. Other claims centre on a bigger drugs-for-hostages operation used as cover by leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) to plant a bomb on board; and a bomb threat warning from the Israelis to Germany and the CIA which the agency failed to act on.

However Webster dismissed the claims and said the CIA had no information that could have given advance warning of the tragedy.

2 comments:

Of perhaps equal significance is a 1995 publication "White House Email - The top secret computer messages the Reagan/Bush White House tried to destroy" - edited by Tom Blanton of the US National Security Archive based at City University, New York.

Immediately after the 1986 public acknowledgement of the White House involvement in the 1980s covert Nicaraguan campaign (also known as Iran-Contra), the instigator and controller of Iran-Contra, Colonel Oliver North, plus an aide of Admiral John Poindexter, went into the basement of the White House and commenced the destruction of some 10,000 emails and telexes containing the illegal acts of members of the White House team throughout the Iran-Contra phase of American history.

That team included Vincent Cannistraro - a man who would later be in charge of the CIA team investigating the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, his colleague Howard Teicher, and Oliver (Buck) Revell of the FBI.

North destroyed around 6,000 telexes before the US courts stepped in and halted the destruction. The 4,000 which survived contain emails from and to Cannistraro. They reveal that he and Buck Revell of the FBI were deeply involved in deceiving the American media and public - and the world - about Iran Contra and events in Central America. Their discussions are proved at one stage to involve the manufacture of evidence to destabilise the government of Yemen. Their emails can be read in photocopy form of the originals. I'm not sure if the book is still available via Amazon.

Should any of your readers wish to see any of the telexes, I will be happy to send them a photocopy from my version of the book. If they would like to contact me via Richard Jeffs, agent to Jim Swire and myself at Lockerbietruth.com, we will arrange it.

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